Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.

Hindu Hootenanny

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

      -- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

I participated today in what could generously be called a debate with someone identifying themselves as @HinduismVideos (no grown-up name provided), very briefly and clumsily touching on a handful of the recurrent themes that are the backbone of the current fight against infantile bronze-age superstition. I found it, in some small way, thrilling to be directly engaged in this manner by a member of the faithful, as I expect the anonymity of his situation allows a person a certain measure of bravery I do not find in many of my face to face arguments.

This argument was spurred by a news article published by the Rationalist website concerning the unequivocal cowardice of the Indian division of Penguin Publishing in their decision to reverse their stand taken with Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and pulp all copies of Wendy Doeniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the result of a frivolous and groundless lawsuit brought against Doeniger for her “zeal” and “disrespect” of the multitude of Hindu deities. Setting aside for the moment the crushing of the free press, the sheer arrogance of a handful of people saying they decide what all Hindus find offensive, and the disgusting failure of the collective spine of Penguin Publishing, a young woman replied to the Rationalist's post with an interrogation into why the claimed factual errors in Doeniger's book had not been enumerated. Anonymous Hindu (hereafter A.H.) then responded, provided links to what he claimed was evidence and the young lady reported back as being chauvinist propaganda from a man called Rajiv Malhotra, with whom I am entirely unfamiliar. The young lady's posts were in her own name, while A.H. felt very comfortable lobbing insults from his unassailable anonymity, so without examining his evidence myself I am comfortable ceding the point to the young lady. A.H. then got a little slimy with the young lady, calling her “your highness” and being generally unlikeable, which is when I spoke up regarding his behavior and he engaged me.

He attributed my assertion that he was an asshole to his being Hindu and claimed the young lady agreed with him, which I refuted as well as explaining that his particular glimpse into the untrue was irrelevant. He was, perhaps, unfamiliar with those words in that order, and accused me of being Shakespeare. I am not sure if he was directly asserting I was a reincarnated soul who was previously an English writer, but did not seek clarification as one can only juggle so much crazy at any given time. He imitated a 60's surfer stereotype and suggested I bump up his video views, and I countered with the argument that it's not fair to listen to the mentally feeble's delusions without putting money in their little cup.

We began in earnest. He claimed a fondness for scientific debate and asked me to name a part of his belief system I disagreed with. I informed him that nothing in his belief structure was scientific, that he sullied the word when he used it, and began on dismantling the childish and absurd principles of karma and dharma. Karma, as a word, seems to have a dual meaning in that it describes both an action and the intent behind that action, an extremely oversimplified explanation of something that is not even understood in a unified way among the practitioners of the shattered and jumbled mess that is greater eastern theology. Karma is an affront to the idea of free will, which I hold very dear, and is a petulant construction of a dissatisfied people who wish that there was some kind of retributive order to the universe. It is no different in that way from the western celestial totalitarianism that lies through its teeth about delayed justice and your dead relatives going “to a better place.” Dharma, to force a translation, is a right way of living as dictated from an external source. A.H. would awkwardly try and reinforce this argument with his later claims that our brains are radios receiving ethics and guidance from the Akashic field promoted by the indefensible Stanislav Grof, but no amount of contortion can demonstrate that free will and morality are both externally-generated things. There is no edict from any god or from any vibrating mass consciousness that dictates our behavior. Our life is our own.

A.H. asked me what happens when we die, as a way of continuing the line of discussion on karma and reincarnation I was so fervently trying to immolate. Reminding me to keep things civilized (a remarkably arrogant thing to say from such a normally charming fellow), he accepted and approved of my assertion that there was no verifiable way to demonstrate consciousness after death, and that neither I nor anyone else could provide him with an accurate answer to that question. He explained that he could never accept a materialist concept of the universe because his intuition and experience informed him that nothing could be random, then asked me why I thought so many people were born into poverty. I was a little shaken by the non-sequitur and accused him of explaining poverty as a consequence of being sullied in the view of an unknown pantheon, which he did not deny.

A.H. explained to me that I couldn't possibly be a random collection of molecules, as there was no evidence for a materialist world view and science has no ability to prove the origins of consciousness. He then asked me if I would be comfortable believing in a random universe or one in which karmic laws held sway, which he described as being equivalent to the observable laws of cause and effect. This is a horribly fatuous and casuistic argument that I run into almost constantly in the community I live in, filled as it is with brash young neo-hippies that cannot imagine anyone before them could have possibly thought of this horrible line of reasoning. In no way, I explained to my intrepid A.H., can the vapid premise of a fabricated celestial scorecard be compared – can be, in no way, compared – to the phenomenon of demonstrable causality. Not only this, but the notion that one's preference or comfort is in any way relevant to anything at all has taken dangerous foothold. I don't care about your comfort, or if an idea is displeasing to you, and neither does anyone else with anything resembling intellectual honesty. But, as one could easily expect, in the splintered factions of religious white noise the idea of momentary comfort or respite is all these people have left.

The argument began to spiral at this point, as I could see A.H. was losing the thread and retracing his steps regarding his preference and his intuition. He repeatedly questioned why I thought my preferences were more important, ignoring my reply that preference had no importance or value to our discussion. He made several self-effacing comments about his faith, complete with unreadable smiley-face emoticons. We revisited molecules and karma, where he offered me the false choice between random molecular interaction and the same dictated by karmic influence. This belied, I think, one of the missteps made by the religious when they try and attribute things like ethics or intent to our molecular makeup, an argument intended to make one try to scramble to provide a chemical composition which will suffice. It seems obvious that there is no molecule where ethics come from just as there is no karmic sway at a molecular (or any other, for that matter) level. Ethics, and to a lesser extent, intent are functions of higher organisms; perhaps the earliest example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. There is, I explained to A.H., no one keeping track of the score for him as every slight received and transgression committed was his and his alone.

 

This is the biggest scoreboard in the world. It is in Houston, not heaven.

  



A.H. was in a corner now, and had no choice but to bring out the double guns akimbo of quantum mechanics and Deepak Chopra (the knowledge of the former sadly having come entirely from the latter). He began with the statements that Roger Penrose's argument on quantum behavior in the microtubules of neurons proved the assertion of reincarnation, but never got around to explaining his reasoning. I was unfamiliar with Penrose's work, but a short amount of reading showed me that I sided with one of his primary opponents, a man called Marvin Minsky. I informed A.H. of this, he replied by asking me who Minsky was, and I reinforced for him the folly of offering someone evidence without reading all the way through it first for yourself, seeing as you can be made to look very stupid should you have to ask for clarification on your own points. He rallied about quantum physics' sound thrashing of Newtonian physics, about how scientists couldn't even understand it, about how Chopra does understand it and how there are “TOP guys” who agree with him, linking me to the review section of Chopra's latest copy of chloroform in print. He furiously defended the stone backwards view (that I know for certain he got from Chopra's stunningly ignorant misinformation) that quantum mechanics is something which applies to all things at all scales, and how my molecules were governed based on these rules. Because of snake oil-selling, predatory charlatan idiots like Deepak Chopra, poor A.H. thinks firstly that quantum mechanics has something to do with atoms. It does not, quantum refers to things of a subatomic scale. He also thinks, as Chopra does, that the rules of quantum mechanics mean that the moon isn't there if he personally is not there to witness light reflect off it. Flagrant dismissal of any kind of joy in learning about how our universe is actually put together, coupled with and trading in self-based arrogant solipsism.

 

However unfairly, I expect my opponent resembles this smelly gentleman.

 



The ease with which great holes were casually rent in his carefully-built tapestry clearly frustrated him, as he resorted to challenging me to “educate” him and “shower some knowledge” on him. His slightly unusual sexual fetish-themed plea fell on deaf ears, however, and I reminded him that the point of our argument was not for me to explain quantum mechanics to him, but to destroy and belittle his faith and worldview. I did however, remind him that he was to be welcome and encouraged on my part to educate himself for education's sake. His final responses to me were to clumsily invoke Heisenberg for no discernible reason and to direct me to an article on quantum physics from someplace called Krishna Path which, let's be honest, I'll never read. I won't trust them to sell me flowers at the airport, why would I ever turn to them for an understanding of physics. We parted ways with his very civil wish for my well-being, which was thoughtful but wholly unnecessary.

 

Fuck you, sign! Don't tell me how to live!

 



I don't wish for my tone in describing this encounter to make it seem as if I regard this man as someone deserving of respect. His beliefs are stupid and wrong, a sloppy collection of mismatched holdovers kept around like commemorative plates. His attitudes about science and ethics infuriate me to my core, and what he finds most holy and precious is most hateful to me. We are enemies, him and I, but he did me the respect of challenging me, and by my count I resorted to sarcasm and barbs on more occasions than he did, and not for noble reasons.

 Quick, send money! Those glasses aren't going to bedazzle themselves, people!

I wanted to relate this experience and reinforce the idea that these beliefs are dangerous to us as a society, and that when they are met in the public square or from the cowardly comfort of an anonymous account they must be gutted head on. I hope this is the first of many conflicts I have with the religious outside my narrow purview, as I feel that every time even the smallest antitheist or secular humanist argues with a believer against their nonsense claims and hateful beliefs, in some small way Thomas Paine is vindicated.

 

Not my creation, but this nicely sums things up.